"Live as Though You are Not Married"

I started my read through Saint Augustine’s “Of Holy Virginity” back in January, and this tonight is the fourth and final post on this work. In its concluding paragraphs, there are many wonderful quotes. Saint Augustine spends his remaining paragraphs encouraging virgins to be faithful to God and their virginity through their love of God and their humility and meekness of heart. In Sunday’s gospel reading today from Saint Matthew 5:5 it says: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.”

In paragraph 52, Saint Augustine says that virginity is guarded by love, and love’s home is humility: “Therefore there is none that guardeth the virginal good, save God Himself Who gave it: and God is Charity (1 John 4:8). The Guardian therefore of virginity is Charity: but the place of this Guardian is humility.” We all, therefore, need to learn from Jesus who said, “I am meek and lowly of heart.” With a humble heart, we can draw close to Jesus and learn from Him, Saint Augustine says, and in a holy humility, Jesus finds rest for His head.

In the next paragraph, 53, Saint Augustine continues to state the absolute necessity for humility and for not justifying oneself: “Let such among your number [of virgins] as persevere, afford to you an example: but let such as fall increase your fear. Love the one that ye may imitate it; mourn over the other, that ye be not puffed up. Do not ye establish your own righteousness; submit yourselves unto God Who justifies you. Pardon the sins of others, pray for your own: future sins shun by watching, past sins blot out by confessing.” We are to give ourselves to God and realize, if we stay free from certain sins, it is due to His grace and help. Therefore, we can love much because we have been forgiven much (either by confessing our sins or by being preserved from falling into the in the first place). We can also be merciful to those who do fall into sin and so pardon them.

Virgins, Saint Augustine says in paragraph 55, have given up marriage to a human person so that they can be married more fully to God. If this is true, then they should put all the energies one normally puts into loving one’s earthly spouse into loving their Divine Spouse: “If, therefore, ye despise marriages of sons of men, from which to beget sons of men, love ye with your whole heart Him, Who is fair of form above the sons of men; ye have leisure; your heart is free from marriage bonds. Gaze on the Beauty of your Lover: think of Him equal to the Father, made subject also to His Mother: ruling even in the heavens, and serving upon the earth: creating all things, created among all things. That very thing, which in Him the proud mock at, gaze on, how fair it is: with inward eyes gaze on the wounds of Him hanging, the scars of Him rising again, the blood of Him dying, the price of him that believes, the gain of Him that redeems. Consider of how great value these are, weigh them in the scales of Charity; and whatever of love ye had to expend upon your marriages, pay back to Him.” Since Jesus is a virgin’s primary and immediate Spouse, Saint Augustine says, virgins should love Him passionately, with all that they have and are.

In the second to last paragraph, 56, Saint Augustine repeats what he said in the previous paragraph and adds that it would be unlawful for a virgin not to wholly love Jesus: “If therefore ye should owe great love to husbands, Him, for Whose sake ye would not have husbands, how greatly ought ye to love? Let Him be fixed in your whole heart, Who for you was fixed on the Cross: let Him possess in your soul all that, whatever it be, that ye would not have occupied by marriage. It is not lawful for you to love little Him, for Whose sake ye have not loved even what were lawful. So loving Him Who is meek and lowly of heart, I have no fear for you of pride.”

Surely what Saint Augustine says of virgins is true: they are specially married to the Divine Spouse and are bound to love Him with their complete and entire self. Since all members of the Church are called to holiness and thus to deep prayer and intimacy with Jesus, all of us are also called to marry God. That is why He made us. A virgin has the opportunity for a special intimacy with Him, and he lives, to a certain extent, the life of heaven here on earth. Yet all people are called into a most intimate relationship with God. Marriage is a symbol of God’s relationship with humanity; in living in a committed and self-sacrificing marriage, one learns how to love and be loved and draws closer to God.

Our goal on this earth is heaven, where there is no marriage. There is no marriage among human persons there because we are all married to God in heaven. For those called to the vocation of marriage, it is the way God has called us to become holy and to love Him. Marriage is a God-given calling which sanctifies those who live it well and generously, as does any vocation. Earthly marriage will eventually pass away at the end of time, and it passes away for all of us who are married when our spouse dies. Earthly marriage, as our vocation, is the path to our heavenly, divine marriage with God. Human marriage is not the end point; it is our path to grow in our relationship with Jesus.

I think that is why Paul says a rather difficult sentence in his first letter to the Corinthians: “I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:29). Paul is not saying that we should think little of marriage. He is saying that it is not the ultimate reality; the ultimate reality is our life in heaven and our marriage to the Divine Spouse. In a similar manner, sex, which the culture of death worships, is not the ultimate reality as good as it is; union with God is the ultimate reality. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O God."

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Barrenness is Death

The first reading of the first weekday of Ordinary Time comes from the first verses of the first Book of Samuel. The book starts with the mother of the great priest and prophet, Samuel, in great distress. She is unable to have children, and there is precious little that matters to Hannah if she cannot give birth to a child. Hannah is one of two wives to her husband, and “Her rival, to upset her, turned it into a constant reproach to her that the LORD had left her barren. This went on year after year; each time they made their pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the LORD, Peninnah would approach her, and Hannah would weep and refuse to eat” (1 Samuel 1:6). The other wife, Peninnah, rubbed it in that Hannah could not have a baby.

One point here is that children are considered a blessing in the Bible. In today’s world and culture, which is a culture of death, children are often considered a curse. This is the exact opposite of the mindset of the Bible. Children are always a blessing and gift from God, even if the manner by which they came about was evil or the timing of their arrival does not fit into our schedule.

The other side of children being a blessing is that, in the Old Testament, being barren is considered a curse. Barrenness is tantamount to death. Not passing on life, not having children, is to die and leave none of your life (children) behind. It is death. Virginity was not esteemed, and the inability to have children was a curse and reproach. There was little worse for a woman than to not have children.

Why do I make this point? I think it ties in with my main theory. The first man and woman feared death, and that is why thy sinned. The death they feared was not so much their own physical death, but it was their fear of not having a child. Not trusting in God and seeking to gain their life, to get a child, they disobeyed God and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, they had relations and conceived Cain, meaning “gotten.” They got the life they were seeking, and he turned out to be death.

It is the fear of death which leads to a life of bondage; Jesus took on our human nature so “that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (Hebrews 2:14-15). Life comes via the tree of life; the tree of life is our heart, and insofar as we trust, love and obey God, we have life. Barrenness is, in many respects, death, and God does want us to be fruitful and full of life. However, the point is that, ultimately, life comes as a gift from God, not from ourselves or our abilities. We have to love and trust Him for that life; the fear of death keeps us separated from Him. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.